Merry ol’ Nöel Brown Summer Theatre’s classy Coward BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

What a mixed-up time, what a charming distraction. In the flapper era, we Yanks may have had the Charleston, bathtub gin and screwball comedies, but merry old England was wittier and bawdier because of Nöel Coward.

Oh Coward!, the 1972 revue of his musical ditties, was the last performance that he ever attended. At 73, he may have been stooped from illness, but Sir Nöel — knighted three years earlier — had Marlene Dietrich on his arm and was still cutting a debonair figure, despite having just three months to live.

Brown Summer Theatre is staging a production of Oh Coward! that is as classy as the man himself. A crystal chandelier hangs above a small stage thrust into the intimate Leeds Theater space; an ornately decorated golden arch surrounds a royal blue curtain.

The four performers certainly match the elegant mood — and, for a bonus, their upper-class English accents remain as firmly affixed as posh on a prince. Most crucial to the collective effect is the playful dignity of Mark Cohen, looking passably like Coward in middle age. He’s joined to stylish effect by Michael Benn, Cait Marshall, and Emily Young.

Coward wrote no fewer than 27 plays and musicals, so there was no lack of source material to mine for nuggets. In fact, the opening medley draws snippets from 11 productions as the company assembles a musical mosaic. It’s a frothy but helpful introduction to Coward, establishing that even celebrated wits aren’t above clichés when productivity rather than the Booker Prize is sought. Coward is capable of writing "We’ll be as happy and carefree/ As birds upon a tree/ High above the sea" as well as the celebrated witticisms of "Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)."

The two hours are grouped into themes, as briefly as two songs describing family eccentrics and as expansively as eight music hall routines. The latter gives plenty of opportunities for choreographer Tisola Logan’s to put the ensemble through entertaining dance movements. The chance is resisted, however, for drummer Matthew Hayashi, accompanying Andrew S. Hertz on piano, to practice rim shots.

Director Lowry Marshall, like Coward in top form, is after subtler and more bitingly satirical stuff here. The song selections about such matters as England, theater, and love provide ample terrain to dig into. It was Coward, after all, who announced in song, for all the world to learn and never forget, that "In Bengal to move at all / Is seldom, if ever, done / But mad dogs and Englishmen / Go out in the noonday sun." Coward is mainly an observer of the drawing room, so we’re hardly surprised to see Cohen staggering out, a Bloody Mary in hand, chat-singing "A Marvelous Party," in which "Young Billy Carr did a stunt at the bar / With a couple of fabulous men."

Coward’s unhidden homosexuality gets flaunted now and then, such as a reference in song to a man making passes at men. (We get a touching personal glimpse of Coward through a memoir passage, where he remarks that his "over-articulate tenderness" is problematical.) But Coward had an equal opportunity attitude when it came to being suggestive or bawdy. In "Mrs. Worthington," Marshall delightfully portrays the tipsy title character, on holiday in Italy, explaining to her children after being pinched, that "They are just high-spirited / As most Italians are / And they have a great deal / More to offer than Papa."

You couldn’t make a case from this material that the sophisticated Sir Nöel was a snob. It’s a Cockney couple waiting for a bus in blustery snow who nobly represent the British tradition of stiff upper lips. In it Benn and Marshall give good jollity, raising "three cheers [for] poor little Sidney / He’s got a spectacular stone in his kidney." In "Three White Feathers," Marshall is an apprehensive woman, married to aristocrat Cohen, who is a nervous wreck because she is about to meet the queen. Her father was a pawnbroker and, more effectively than with an essay on class amity, Coward has her break into bawdy song about how tonight she might have three white feathers (in her hat) "but yesterday it was three brass balls."

Yes, Coward certainly respected spunk. Benn, outfitted as a gaucho with a rose in his teeth, praises in song the eponymous Nina, who "refused to begin the beguine/ When they requested it / She detested it!" All the ensemble members get their solos, and in "London Pride," Young sweetly sings of the namesake flower that grows from sidewalk cracks, again touting the national spirit.

Revues can be musical pastiches that miss as often as hit. Oh Coward! has a single source who is inspiring enough to make sure this talented little Brown troupe keeps us laughing throughout.